


The Doors of Durin

by lynndyre



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mythological Craftsmanship, Second Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 18:29:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2035536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Celebrimbor and Narvi, and the construction of their legacy together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Doors of Durin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Evandar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/gifts).



> A/N – This is set before SA 1000, during the canonically-undated reign of Durin II – based on the inscription of the doors themselves, the founding date of Eregion (SA 700) and the alliance between the elven and dwarven smiths, and Durin III’s reign known to be much later (around SA 1600), when Celebrimbor gifted him one of the Seven. I believe the doors were built in the bloom of that alliance, giving them 700-900 years of operation before they were finally closed after the fall of Hollin in SA 1697.
> 
> I’ve used the name Moria here because it was written on the doors themselves, and in lieu of another Sindarin name (since Sindarin is the common tongue between the dwarves and the elves of Hollin at this time), though elsewhere it’s implied Khazad-dum was only called Moria after the dwarves were driven out in the Third Age.
> 
> I am ascribing to mithril some of the qualities and values of platinum, and 'eilianraud' is the platinum group metal iridium, which greatly increases the melting point of its alloys. Such that, say, a mythical counterpart of it might be used to create rings requiring dragonfire to melt.

As the night reached its greatest depth, and the moon slid over the crest of the mountains, Celebrimbor slipped out the working door of Moria’s westmost bounds and made his way along the cliff-face, settling himself in the cool, packed earth before the carved doorway. He closed his eyes, and let himself feel the starlight.

The breezes, when they came, were gentle, and carried the smell of blackberry leaves, and holly trees, and night on the grass, and the clear moistness of the spray from the falls. It was a sweet noise, the water, constant yet ever shifting, and he let his mind follow it.

Beneath the rush of the Stair Falls, another sound emerged; the soft, weighted tread of dwarven boots. Celebrimbor opened his eyes, taking a moment to blink away the dreamspace of his contemplation before turning his head. Narvi stood in the shadow of the stone archway, head tilted in curiousity.

“Master Narvi.” Celebrimbor smiled, acknowledging the question in his glance. “I came to feel the moonlight.”

Narvi huffed into his beard, a low, amused fox's-tail of a sound as he settled himself on one of the smaller, flat-topped stones that acted as stepping stools for higher work. “Say rather you came to reflect it.” For Celebrimbor’s forearms were bare, and his shirt open at the neck, and in the low shadow of the cliffs his skin held the faint glow of the eldar.

"It is strange to me, wondrous strange, to build a gateway so welcoming --for this border between our lands to be opened so freely. To build a door only visible by starlight, by moonlight, yet not for concealment. You were not there, I think, when Durin King first asked me to use ithildin. The doors will be open in daylight, he told me. There is no need for them to be visible under the sun, for we will keep the doorway open to your people, but at night the ithildin will shine, and the doors will glow, and all who are friends of this realm will have safe haven in our halls."

"Speak, friend, and enter." Narvi nodded.

"I have little memory of other shores, only the received knowledge of my forebears and their kin, yet there is something in this spirit of your king more wholesome even than that distant paradise. Here, in this flawed world, after all the time of failures, of death, of breaking and the dooms we have wrought upon the world's face and peoples, yet things are rebuilt, and built new, and friendships flourish, and...." Celebrimbor turned his face towards the moon, and caught it's light full across him, as it flooded now the cliff wall, and the grass, and danced on the surface of the falling water. "And I can sit and feel the moon, and learn how to speak this metal I will craft into the form it needs, and with your great stone doors it will be a wonder I am glad to be a part of."

And Narvi was quiet, then, as was his way, but Celebrimbor knew it now to be a thinking silence, and was content in it, for his heart was full. It was a new age, and the building of Ost-in-Edhil had allowed him to begin to feel it as such. This alliance was something more.

“In our language, there are two words for a love of crafting. Sindarin has nothing to translate easily. One means crafting as a thing that gives life meaning, to use the gifts we were given to connect ourselves to the world, to our families.” His eyes cut to Celebrimbor’s. “To others. That is crafting to enrich life. To have joy in it, and share that joy through one’s creations.”

Workings of stone, of metal, of glass, or gems, even workings of wood, or the crafting of food and drink – dwarves were made to create, in whatever form, and that was a spirit Celebrimbor could only agree with.

“The other word is different. Some would translate it as pride in creation, as devotion to craft in and for itself. It is a more selfish thing. I am not old enough to remember, but I think elves know it, even if they do not have the word for it.”

Three gems, shining in a spill of blood. Celebrimbor did not hide his wince. 

“Yes. We know it.”

“Peace.” Narvi rose, and moved to let his hand fall on Celebrimbor’s shoulder. It was heavy, far heavier than elven hands, and warm through his thin shirt. “Dwarves know it too, or we would not name it. Some of us revere it. I do not. I build stone to be lived in. I build doors that hide, walls that stand, air vents in lattices no one will ever see, so that those who live beneath breathe cleanly.”

His grip was strong, not in threat, but in thought, and Celebrimbor absorbed its grounding force.

"I like that you came to feel, here. Your crafting-love is of the first kind. My doors will be glad to bear your words."

 

***

 

On his return to Ost-in-Edhil Celebrimbor began the ithildin.

For this, Celebrimbor did not begin at his forge. Instead, at his worktable he drew forth a small oak barrel of powdered silver, and from a high shelf took down a series of ceramic jars, glazed in soft pastels. These were his rarer metallic powders, formed when a molten stream was directed to fall through a jet of the hottest fire, so that the liquid metal was blown out like water droplets, to cool and harden into powdered form. It was a dangerous process, and even elven smiths took great care attempting it. The melting point of mithril was high indeed, and of other metals higher still, and in its molten form glowed so greatly that mortal eyesight might be damaged, and even Celebrimbor worked it masked, as was the fashion of many of the dwarven smiths.

Once powdered, however, the process of creating alloys could be greatly simplified, for the metals could be mixed without the forge heat, and stirred together, even compressed into a rough shape, and in jewelry making, Celebrimbor found this most useful. The forge was needed to bond each to each, but only at the last, and without near the heat required to melt each individual component.

Thus the ithildin began to take form. A base of silver, swift-melting, to carry the nobler metals. Truesilver, mithril, to build the alloy’s true depth, to catch the light of the evening and bring it forth. Eilianraud, lesser sister of mithril, called so for all its prismatic salts, to raise the point of melting, and reinforce the structure. Other things he added too, other metals, and rarer compounds, measured in tiny cups made from unreactive glass.

He worked the forge-fire up to the precise heat slowly, keeping it burning even. Not for the first time, Celebrimbor wished that dragons could be tamed to a more useful form, to grow only, say, to the size of a dog. Then he would keep one in his workshop, and train it to breathe fire when asked, rather than carrying projects back and forth between his workshop storeroom and the heated forge. And his workstation held enough raw materials in precious gems and metals to make a respectable hoard for a very small dragon.

The fire sparked warmly against his hand, and he laughed at himself, and fell back into the place of crafting.

The forge heat needed to soften only the silver, to coax it around the other metals, to bond it through, and Celebrimbor sang to the flames as they rose, sang to the metal as it heated. He sang of the safety of stone, of havens of halls, of moonlight and starlight on his face, of friendship and welcome beneath the earth. 

This is what you are become. Light, and surety of safe-haven, and emblems of friendship.

No mere sintering, the metal shone in answer, blending as he willed it, allowing him to draw it out into thick strands, thicker than wire, which flickered insubstantially in the light of the forge-fires, and glowed fierce in the moonlight through the window of his workshop, when he finally retired.

 

***

 

He returned to the doorway by way of the stone stairs, leaping up them easily though they were wet with the spray of the falls, their edges green with bright mosses. The moisture tasted good on his skin, after days spent overlong between forge and workshop, and he crested the cliff’s edge invigorated and beheld Narvi’s work in his absence.

The two stone blocks that would form the doors themselves had been quarried from the same vein of rock, much further along the cliff face, chosen and sculpted to fit the doorway with utmost precision.

Now they lay quiescent before the archway, while Narvi and Buri his chief assistant, a master stonemason in her own right, refined the hinges and pivot points on the outer edge.

“Master Silversmith. You are in good time. The inlay channels are ready to be carved.”

And Celebrimbor was happy to leave his pack in the shadow of the cliff wall, and go directly to the stone, though not that of the doors themselves. The first patterns were chalked out in spare stone, to test the depth of channel, and to confirm in turn each step of the inlay process before proceeding to the twin slabs of the doors.

Narvi’s masons had so cunningly roped and rigged the stones that frame and lever and dwarvish strength easily raised them to the vertical, held upright for Celebrimbor to draw out the master pattern, mirroring exactly the shapes of archways and twining trees, ensuring that Durin’s crown and anvil and the star of the House of Feanor fell in the true center, and would form complete images when the doors were flush against one another. The inscription was chalked out as precisely, for each letter would likewise require channel and inlay.

The doors were laid flat again for the carving, to ensure equal depth as the stone was worked, and Celebrimbor and Narvi did the work themselves. It was at the end of the fourth day that Celebrimbor chalked a half-fanciful _calma_ in the uppermost left corner, and an _óre_ on the right. Narvi rubbed the sweat from his face with the back of his furred forearm, and laughed at the letters, and on the next morning, the initials of their names had been cut into the final rock, awaiting the metal to fill them.

The labour of the inlay itself was all Celebrimbor’s own. The thinnest of preparatory coatings along the inside of each channel, to bond metal and stone one to the other. The long, shining strands of ithildin, cut and fitted and beaten into place, until the surface of door and metal lay even, with no variance even beneath the sensitivity of elven fingertips.

He sang as he worked, the worksite nearly deserted, for Narvi had sent his assistants within to the warmth of the mountain. But Narvi himself stayed, and listened, working within the wall of the archway to fit the bearings and counterweights that would support the huge hinges, and allow the doors to swing outward in a full half-circle.

The words were not always in Sindarin, for it was not the first language in which Celebrimbor had learned to create. Truth and intent mattered more than language, and the metal absorbed his song with every beat of his hammer, as it folded into letters, stars, trees.

From the Gate Stream he gathered water, and mixed with it a powder of his own devising, which dissolved utterly and left the water still clear, but a deeper blue that seemed only a trick of the shadows in the dusk. And with Narvi beside him, for the work within the walls was complete, he waited for moonrise, and full night. Within the mountains, fires were lit, and up one level, down two, and through the left-middle path were the western-most kitchens of Moria, where they often ate together with other workers, but tonight they made their supper of bread remaining from lunch, and dried fruit and stream water, and Narvi passed Celebrimbor a flask of spiced liquor that sparked in bright firefly-lights of taste across his palate, and soothed his throat from the singing-work of the day. 

Narvi hummed, in the back of his throat, and Celebrimbor watched the last flecks of sunlight catch in the few coppery strands among his thick brown hair, the few more in his short beard. The variance between hair and beard was a pleasing contrast, and his jeweler’s eye imagined it complimented with a subtle gradient in gemstones, perhaps set in a circlet and beads. Pink stones, in gold, for vitality and warmth, gems set dwarvish-fashion, in twists of elven metalwork. 

The spice of Narvi’s drink lingered in his mouth.

When the moon hung full in the sky, Celebrimbor took up the solution he had made, and washed the surface of the doors with it, metal and stone alike. It flowed as water, and dried quickly, leaving no residue, but glistened on the metal under the light of stars and moon. And Celebrimbor whispered to the metal, and it caught that light and gathered it, no longer reflecting but shining out in the night, the glow of the lines bright against his skin, casting moonlit shadows up the planes of Narvi’s face as he ran a hand along the rock.

Satisfaction bubbled and thrilled in Celebrimbor’s chest. Yes. Let it shine.

 

***

 

The next day the finished doors were raised and set in place, Narvi’s masons angling each great slab upright, two handspans above Celebrimbor’s head. The inscriptions went unseen under the light of the sun, waiting within the rock to be awoken, while Narvi and Buri tested the pivot of each door, and brought them through their full range of motion. Celebrimbor watched as here a pivot was adjusted, here an edge filed, sanded, until afternoon crept late around them. The lifting frames were drawn away, and began to be disassembled.

Finally, Narvi gave word, and Buri called to one of the other masons, and together they pulled the doors closed from the inside. As the gap closed, the hinges vanished, and the shape of the door itself faded away, until the stone stood unmarked, and unmarred in the dusk.

Celebrimbor’s breath caught.

The sun was vanished past the horizon, and the deep blue of night creeping up the sky, and already the first stars were appearing, one, and then more, as the last of the sun faded.

In the cliff-face, the Two Trees of Valinor shone, and the hammer and anvil of the dwarves, and the crown and seven stars of Durin Reborn. 

Narvi folded his arms, and nodded. He leaned back, a warm, solid weight against Celebrimbor’s hip as he glanced up to meet his eye.

“Speak.”

Celebrimbor swallowed. “ _Mellon_.”

And the star flared, bright lines shining brighter still, and the Doors of Durin swung wide.


End file.
